Tag: Iraq

Destroying, degrading or containing the Islamic State—whichever goal President Obama chooses—will be the easy part. Finding ways for fundamentalist Islam to express itself peacefully is a bigger, tougher and more important project.

Joint Iraqi and Kurdish forces began moving into Tikrit on Tuesday night into Wednesday after victories over the so-called Islamic State of Syria and the Levant in villages around Amerli, including Sulaiman Bek.

Minus a couple of invasions, the steps being considered or already in effect to deal with “the threat of ISIS” are a reasonable summary of the last 13 years of what was once called the Global War on Terror and now has no name at all.

The “Colbert Report” host talks about the latest threat in the Middle East, the Islamic State, as well as Fox News’ weirdly imaginative (or rather delusional) responses to ISIS, all of which are so detached from reality that the comedian decides it’s time to invoke ghosts to explain current events in terms that right-wing pundits can truly get their heads around.

“It’s very unlikely that U.S. airstrikes will be able to stop” the Sunni fundamentalist group’s march across Syria and Iraq, professor Vijay Prashad tells “Democracy Now!” on Monday. A coalition of regional militaries and even militias is needed.

Former British ambassador to the United States Sir Christopher Meyer is advocating that the U.S. and Western Europe stop advocating the overthrow of the Baath regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and instead coordinate with it to move against the so-called Islamic State.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Patrick Cockburn on James Foley’s murder and the rise of the Islamic State, Dennis Kucinich on the militarization of police, and Joshua Rofe on the 2,500 teen lifers in prison.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Patrick Cockburn on James Foley’s beheading and the rise of the Islamic State, Dennis Kucinich on the militarization of police, and Joshua Rofe on the 2,500 teen lifers in prison.

An interactive map of American counties lets readers see how many aircraft, armored vehicles, body armor, grenade launchers, vision accessories and assault rifles left over from the military-industrial complex’s bloody adventures in the Middle East have ended up in their hometown.

Reports that an estimated 2,000 Europeans have joined jihadists fighting for territory in Syria and Iraq are a reminder that feelings of loyalty are not givens and can be diverted away from one’s place of origin.

When you do something again and again only to see indifferent or even negative results, you wouldn’t be surprised if a neutral observer questioned your sanity. Yet few Americans question the sanity or cult-like behavior of American presidents as they continue to seek solutions to complex issues by bombing Iraq (as well as numerous other countries across the globe).

If prime minister-designate Haidar al-Abadi in Iraq is to hope to defeat the so-called Islamic State (actually a kind of mafia made up of serial murderers and marauders), he must find a way to reincorporate Iraq’s Sunni Arabs into the government.

As the Iraqi military made a push on Tikrit north of Baghdad on Tuesday, a video briefly surfaced purporting to show the IS beheading an American journalist, James Foley, a freelancer for GlobalPost who had been missing in Syria for two years.

A man believed to be kidnapped journalist James Foley was beheaded in a video released to the public by militants who say another captured American will be killed if the United States continues its campaign against ISIS in Iraq.

Arguably, the so-called Islamic State (actually a vicious gang of serial killers) could never have taken over northern and western Iraq if the largely Sunni Arab populations there had not been deeply alienated from the government in Baghdad by the openly sectarian politics of former Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The Mideast scholar suspects the U.S. will begin bombing Iraq like northern Pakistan, police in Ferguson, Mo., provoke a federal investigation, Hillary Clinton stumbles and we remember Robin Williams.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The Mideast scholar suspects the U.S. will begin bombing Iraq like northern Pakistan, police in Ferguson, Mo., provoke a federal investigation, Hillary Clinton stumbles and we remember Robin Williams.

According to a spokesman for his Da’wa Party (Islamic Call or Islamic Mission), Iraq’s prime minister-designate Haydar al-Abadi is preparing a platform on the basis of which he will see to form a new government; one of the planks is a joint Iraqi-international military push against the so-called Islamic State in Tikrit.

President Barack Obama, in the interview given last weekend to The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, provided illumination on his foreign policy thinking, at this moment of fraught drama in both Iraq and Ukraine, but the counsels concerning the two didn’t match.